The US Electoral System

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing the US electoral system. And unusually, because of the lockdown, the new lockdown, we are recording this remotely. Nick, US electoral system, why is that on your mind?

Speaker B: 00:00:34

Well, I don't know if you've been following the news recently, but there's what they call an election happening in the United States. A presidential election, along with,

Speaker A: 00:00:44

I guess, a park congressional, is that right? Yeah, I think that's right. But it's the

Speaker B: 00:00:49

presidential side of things I think we want to discuss here. Because the US electoral system seems on the face of it to be quite weird. I don't think it's well understood here, actually, in the UK, possibly not in the US either, because of the way that the ballot papers are designed. But no American votes for the president. That is not how it works. They vote for these one time only electors. The electors then get together in the state capital, wherever the state is, is sort of hosting the election. And then they vote for the president. So there's a kind of strange, sort of indirect method that people use to vote for the president. Now, in is increasingly the case that on the ballot papers, it tells you the name of the president, who you will effectively end up with. But that's certainly not how it was originally. Originally, did vote for the elector and you trust and kind of trusted them to make a decent decision. That was the idea, you know, that the electors were the people who would decide who the president would be. Now, that exists these days in kind of name as it were, you know, in the process still involves voting for electors. But now, effectively, in almost all cases, people vote for an elector knowing who that elector will vote for. Now, then what happens is the when the electors have decided for their state who they want as president, in almost every case, all of the votes for that state will be cast for that president. And that explains why the coverage of the US electoral, the US president election is so seems from our perspective to be so weirdly focused on these regions, these key regions, you know, the sort of Florida, why, why do we care about a percent or two in Florida? Well, it's because whoever wins, you know, 51% of the electors in Florida gets 100% of the votes in what's misleadingly called the Electoral College, because another thing is that doesn't exist, the Electoral College doesn't exist. Well, there's they don't meet anywhere. What happens is they write down who they've chosen as president should their choice of who the president should be, is sent to various people, one of whom is the President of the Senate, who assembles them all together, and counts them in during a session of Congress to declare the winner. And that that, but that process happens on January the sixth. So the election, the results of the election are really unknown on the night, but to some extent, but in fact, the president isn't really actually voted for officially till the sixth of January. So it's, it's quite weird. I mean, it's extremely weird, the way that the Americans vote for their president kind of explains the strange way that it appears to be covered from our perspective. And so and not, I mean, understandably gets a bit of a bad press. There are some really weird corollaries, one of which is that because of the way that the electoral college votes are given out to states, which is a kind of mashup of historical things and and vague principles about mathematical relations, the you end up with quite a lot of difference in in how much sort of how many people in different states constitute one electoral college vote. So in Wyoming, they get one electoral college vote for every 200,000 people. But in California, they only get one vote for every 700,000 people. So really, people in Wyoming get sort of three and a half times more representation in their votes are effectively weighted three and a half times more than people in California. So it's, it's a very old system. Anyway, it gets a lot of bad press. And I thought we might we might get together and try and put the case for the defense. So it's all about it's about waiting, isn't it is to is to if you had one state one vote, then people in small states would have massively more. Yeah. Does that still

Speaker A: 00:05:07

mean can you can you wait it and not have to go through the rigmarole of having an election?

Speaker B: 00:05:15

eral times, Rutherford Hayes,: 1876

Speaker A: 00:06:44

Peter, I want to come to you. But I think the second point is it's not just elections where I find the US system of government, you know, a little bit complicated. And it feels a little bit sort of over designed and over tinkered with. That's how it comes sometimes can feel to me. And I know that this sort of system of checks and balances actually can just translate into paralysis

Speaker C: 00:07:05

it was sort of established in: 1788

Speaker B: 00:09:49

So that's sort of, that's the argument, is it for why they, people in the more rural states effectively have more say, is to cap, is that, so it's the waiting, because I don't really understand. I mean, if there's more people in the city, it feels a bit like to me, well, they should have more say anyway, because more of them.

Speaker C: 00:10:07

Yeah, but it's to do is to rebalance the difference of priorities that people living in the city don't care about ranching and quality of fences and quality of rural roads. They care about railways, and they care about industry, and they care about abolishing slavery and that kind of stuff, and abolishing slavery and all that sort of thing. So yeah, so it's, so it's to sort of ensure that you have a greater than proportional representation of rural affairs in the houses.

Speaker A: 00:10:36

Do the electors for each state have to vote in the same way?

Speaker C: 00:10:40

So that's a good question. No, it's quite complicated. So the different states have different rules about how the election can and should be conducted, more or less, it's just, they have common rules. So everyone has a secret ballot, etc, etc. But some, some states allow postal voting, some votes don't, some states don't. It's more complicated than the odds.

Speaker B: 00:11:04

Yeah, they actually, the question, I think it was your question about block voting, because that's the, yeah, that's really why I think there are only a couple of states that don't do block voting. But in nearly all states, the person who gets the majority of the electors in that state, effectively gets all of the votes from that state. Now that also points to another, another potential rationale for this, which is that at the moment, you know, if you were to have an entirely one person, one vote system in the US to select the president, it would underrepresent the interests of states. If you are able as a state to block vote, then you become more important. So it's a way of, it's a way of, you're sacrificing potentially the interests of, you know, a minority of people in your state to have more say. You know, people want to appeal to California and New York more because they have more votes in the electoral college. And, and that's, that, that wouldn't happen if it was one person, one vote, you know, every New Yorker would count the same as everyone in, you know, New Hampshire. But the, the, the point about, you know, block voting, is it, do you, do you know about the secret, the secret, the secret caucus system? No. Well, it's a, it's a, it's a method of how you can use block votes to get, to get your own way, cheekily. So let's imagine that there's nine, nine people, right? We're, we're part of a group of nine people. They've all got to choose which pie to have for dinner. So now we get together and we all, we kind of agree that what we'll do is we'll just vote among the three of us, right? For which pie, chicken or beef. And as it happens, Peter and I favor the chicken and you favor the beef, but we say, well, we'll use, we'll, the three of us will be a block vote and we'll go in. And what we then do is link up secretly with another two people and we pretend to them that we'll have a little block vote of the five of us, right? And, and we'll use that block vote to completely determine the outcome of the vote of the nine. So, so in our five, we block vote for the beef. And then the other two people who are in our secret, our secret caucus, well, they think they're in the secret caucus. They're not because we're the real, real secret caucus inside that caucus. We all go in and everyone block votes for the beef. But effectively, the three of us have managed to determine the votes of all nine of the pie choosing committee by a series of successive block votes. But what you didn't know, Fraser, was that me and Peter secretly chose in advance that we both wanted the beef and we used you as an instrument to do that. That's the, that, that is the, that's the power of block voting anyway. It gives you a, it gives you much more power to be able to influence things. So that's that, so that, that is a, that's the rationale for, I think, why, why most States do it. So it's only,

Speaker C: 00:13:53

yeah, it's only two, so Nebraska and Maine that don't operate, don't operate block voting.

Speaker A: 00:13:58

I was going to say as famously, that's how Adolf Hitler got the whole of Germany eating chicken pie. But anyway, that's a different, different thing. So yeah, where are we? So, I mean.

Speaker B: 00:14:10

Well, actually there's a few other things which are a bit more human, I think. I think Peter's outlined the sort of the historical rationale. There are a few things, you know, people have obviously revisited this and in the, in the sort of early 19th century, I know there's a sort of discussion about what, obviously one of the things that the American constitution designed against is, you know, coming entirely out of that historical American experience of sort of being, of being concerned by too much power being given to a small number of people is one of the things. And I think this is a really good thing. And I, it totally makes sense to me is that the reason that they have, so the one original plan was to have the Congress elect the president, but then they, they sort of realized that actually we better to have these one time voters, these electors, because they, then they would not be subject to any undue influence, or at least it would be much harder for them to be subject to any undue influence because they'd have no, they'd have no, you know, ability to do anything other than that one, that one thing. And it's also supposed to, it was supposed to sort of reduce factionalism because they, they, they wouldn't be, there'll be less opportunity for the electors to kind of get together and intrigue and so on.

Speaker C: 00:15:28

And an interesting sort of historical aspect is the, the reason that the, the, the, that it takes so long, it takes until January for the president to be fully sort of sworn in and things, is that the, that time was given for them to travel from their far and distant state to Washington to, to be present at the, in the Senate to be counted. And the, and until more recent times where the electors are actually selected by the party, so that you can more or less guarantee that they're going to vote a certain way. They, they were just independents, they were sort of like members of a jury. They were, I think they were all officials, but they were, they were all independents. And the idea was that they, that in that time, they travelled to January, it gave them time to read the newspapers and to hear all the gossip that might sway their actual vote about the individual candidate. So they're out of cont, they're no longer have being Brit, they're having the candidate breathing down their neck in their given state, they're kind of out of the system. And they've got time to reflect on what that, what their actual vote is. So if they discover something that they are unpalatable about their candidate, they can change their mind. I wonder if that did happen. So there's a paternalistic

Speaker B: 00:16:45

element to this. And I think that's part of it is, is the thought that the point is the electors have access to information that the general public doesn't have, and will make better decisions. And I think ultimately, now the problem is at the moment, now people do actually, there's this thing called faithless electors where they, where they, where they vote for someone other than the person they're supposed to vote for, but it's very, very rare. It is effectively on rails, you know, that they are kind of more or less obliged these days to vote for the person who they're supposed to vote for. But the original intention was that they would just be better informed, better at deciding stuff. And you know, you would vote for an elector who you had confidence was good at making those sorts of decisions. But they were, you know, their main concern was to, was to, was against the, you know, this kind of fear of populism. The point is, the electors were supposed to be a bulwark against, against, against a populist, you know, president who was good at whipping up support, but bad at making policies. Now, thank goodness that's never happened. But, but, but, you know, in a way, I think that being a key concern of the, of the people who design this system, that is probably the biggest casualty of the way it's evolved. And I, and I think, so probably one of the main reasons it's like this, it's really not able to do, which is to, to block, you know, to, to make a sensible kind of policy-based decision, I guess, that we have really gone, or the US has really gone down the route of trying to be as representative as possible, in terms of the system, you know, to represent the wishes of the people, but not necessarily, I would say the interests of the people. Just, just an aside that there are most

Speaker C: 00:18:22

states, I think, actually impose a fine on the elector who does not vote the way that they're sort of obliged to vote based on the vote, based on the public vote. Five dollars. I probably varies. But yeah, it's bad form. And it's codified in legislation.

Speaker B: 00:18:42

Yeah, I mean, I think there is possibly an argument to say that, okay, people, I know, people, particularly on the left, really have it in for Donald Trump and see him as a kind of monster. But you can get a lot worse than Donald Trump. And, you know, and I suppose the feeling is, in much the same way that the Queen would never, would never go against the wishes of parliament, but in theory can, you know, and hold things up at least until they can abolish the monarchy. The Electoral College could stand in the way of, you know, a genuine Hitler. I suppose that's the theory.

Speaker A: 00:19:17

Most of the way through, actually. But that being the case, and a couple of questions. I mean, first of all, I think we need to sort of talk a little bit more about, you know, defensive, what seems like a complicated system. And we've already gone some way down that. I like the way there's an element of that it smooths out the distribution of power. And so, you know, heavily densely populated areas don't get overrepresented. So that's one thing. So I've got two questions. First of all, is there any any more defences that we can offer? Secondly, just as a query, I don't know if you know this, is there any call for electoral reform in the US? Is it an issue? Or is it just? Yeah, yeah. Tell us about I mean, what do you know

Speaker C: 00:19:58

about this side of things, Peter? So it's a hot topic, every single election, and in between elections. There have been, I think, in history, since it's been in place, there have been over 700 amendments proposed. And so that's not just like an idea that's actually gone to for discussion in the Senate, with a few, only a handful being accepted. And so it's constantly up for debate. And the reason, one of the main reasons, certainly in 21st and 20th century is because it's very divisive. The electoral college system, if changed, would have very difficult different outcomes for the overall results of the election. So really, it's often a partisan issue, which particular kind of system you would prefer to use. Yeah. But it's probably worth delving slightly into the why, why isn't it changed more frequently? Aside from, you know, the partisan issue, it's hard, it's politically very difficult to get any changes through any constitution, any constitutional change requires a two third approval rating in both houses and for it to pass plus 30, 38 states need to all ratified independently. So it's, you have to have like a very fairly overriding reason that everyone agrees with in order to get any kind of any kind

Speaker A: 00:21:37

of significant change through. And I guess you've kind of hinted at it there a bit as well as those structural sort of built in hindrances, is that any electoral system in the world has problems with reform, because it's that turkeys don't vote for Christmas thing, right? If you're in power, and you've come to power, because of that system, where you think, well, I quite like that system, it's a fair system, it's the right system, you know. So, yeah, can we turn to this question of, you know, what other defences can we offer other than that? It's sort of, you know, then what we've already said that it helps spread out representation?

Speaker B: 00:22:09

Well, or we could talk about how we what might an idealised electoral system look like?

Speaker A: 00:22:15

Yeah, so yeah, go for it. Just go on then. So what might an idealised electoral system look like?

Speaker B: 00:22:21

Well, I think I actually don't, I'm not sure there is one. And I think the there's quite a lot, there's some, there's quite a bit of sort of mathsy theory about voting systems, which, you know, so there's, there's a thing called arrows impossibility theorem, which is specifically about when you're ranking alternatives as a group, and you, you know, nothing satisfies these two very simple criteria, it's a bit involved, I don't want to go into it, it's also not something you actually particularly need to worry about. But it just shows that actually, there isn't an idealised voting system, which kind of fulfils two quite intuitive criteria. There's also there's a thing called the Condorcet paradox, where you can show that a group of people can collectively, if they rank their preferences can can sort of end up with this weird transitive ranking, where A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, but C is also preferred to A. And so you, you know, you there's a lot of theory about it. But But I think in real life, you know, we've got to look at what works in practice. And you can see that, you know, actually, in most countries, we have this we have this kind of winner takes all sort of presidential type system, where you have the leader. And then we have some other kind of slightly more representative party type system, you know, where you vote for a party and that that that is represented, you know, percentage wise. Now, there's all is possible to imagine having having things like, well, why do we have to have? Why do we have to have a president? Why couldn't we have a presidential committee where, you know, people were represented on that committee, according to the number of votes, you know, cast for each party, for example. And instead of taking a person and letting that person make decisions, you simply, you know, split that person out into 10 other people, and they make decisions collectively, which are then enacted. Why not, right? I mean, it's just a decision machine. That's one one possibility. But but, you know, all of these things, any system is going to have this persistent trade off between representativeness and effectiveness. And that seems to be the big issue. It's like the debate about, you know, sort of first past the post versus pay, you know, proportional representation is proportional representation is a bit fairer, you know, more people's votes are represented, but it gets less done. It's harder to generate. It's hard to generate, you know, kind of a force for change. And it's easier to oppose any particular measure. There's a lot more consensualism that has to go on. And so I think in a way, you know, and this is totally apart from the problem of well, is are people actually voting in their best interests? You know, there's plenty of evidence that people vote based on factionalism made worse, because we have this party system, which, you know, didn't exist when the founding fathers were putting together the constitution. Voters vote on things like looks and how deep someone's voices. I think that I think deep down, the closer you look, you know, the problem is, is there the problem is that actually, we're not going to design a system, which produces the best leaders, whatever, however it works, if people are going to make stupid choices in the ballot.

Speaker C: 00:25:38

The only answer is to get rid of the humans from the process and hand everything over to an AGI who will hopefully be a benevolent overlord.

Speaker B: 00:25:46

Hopefully, yeah, unfortunately, I mean, I think Chile tried that, didn't they in the 70s with Stafford Beer, you know, kind of designed a computerized system, which would which would run. It was a sort of modern way of running a communist country. But like all communist countries, it didn't, you know, it didn't. It was sort of fundamental problems that meant it didn't work. But no, I think I'm going to stick up for a constitutional democracy here. I'm sorry, a constitutional monarchy. I actually think there is something to be said for having a president for life, like we have in the Queen. Now, I know that in real life, the Queen has no power, but effectively, she is constitutionally a president of life. The prime minister doesn't exist. You know, we vote for, we don't vote for a prime minister. The job of a prime minister is very kind of badly, it's not terribly well defined in the constitution. You know, people in the US might be surprised to know that we don't vote for a prime minister. He's just an MP who other MPs rather like, and that system is a little bit more, I think, like, I suspect what the founding fathers had in mind, when they thought we the best people to decide who the leader is going to be is going to be one of the one of the politicians. So I think, you know, I think I think it, you know, yeah, as I said, it's a trade off. And the big problem is that we're not going to fix the issue, which is voters.

Speaker A: 00:27:01

And I yeah, and actually, yes, another sort of plug for constitution, sorry, for a parliamentary for constitutional monarchy is I like having the fact that your head of government and your head of state are two different people. I think that's quite valuable sometimes. And yeah, if you get a good one, if you get a good monarch, and I think the the Queen, our current Queen Elizabeth second, I think she's a good monarch. And that sort of stability and having that for a long time is quite nice. And also, so a point you made once before, Nick, on another podcast is, if you got two houses in the legislative, the you know, the with the upper house, the there's no point electing it, you've kind of already done that with the lower one. And, you know, it's filled the top one with the great and the good. And if you can all kind of different guns can all successive governments can all kind of trust each other, you know, consecutively, then as long as that house doesn't get full of ancient hereditary. But you know, that's maybe a working program. Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm rambling. Look, we need to finish off we need to stop before we finish

Speaker B: 00:28:05

off anything to say anything to must have a blockchain based system, which will fix democracy.

Speaker C: 00:28:10

No, it is a trade off. And as soon as you as soon as you make the collective decision to give people the vote, then it's gonna get real, it gets complicated and messy, because people are

Speaker A: 00:28:23

complicated and messy. You heard it here first from Aleph Insights, or rather from the Cognitive Engineering podcast that people what was it people are messy? Did you say complicated and messy?

Speaker B: 00:28:34

Yeah, from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. I am very nice. Where's that from? I like that. Was it a manual Kent or something?

Speaker A: 00:28:43

So we'll find it and put it in the show notes. Right, we'll wrap up there. Thank you as always, by the way, being messy and complicated, whatever it was, I think you're just influenced by the fact that you're in baby world at the moment, Peter. That's being complicated. Yeah, yeah, there we go. All right. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.